Category: M Radha Madhavi

India has become so accustomed to the convenience of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) that many of us have forgotten what life was like before instant digital payments became part of everyday life. Yet, whenever there is a discussion about charges associated with digital transactions, some of the criticism seems disproportionate. The larger question is simple:…

Every year, on the full-moon night of Kartik Purnima, thousands of people gather along the banks of the Mahanadi in Cuttack, Odisha, to float tiny handmade boats on the water. Made from paper, bamboo sticks, dried banana bark and pieces of cork, these little boats are more than colourful symbols of a festival. They carry…

Bharat cannot become a technological power while remaining dependent on others for the silicon brains that run its economy and defend its sovereignty Former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan is entitled to question the Narendra Modi government’s semiconductor strategy. Economists should question government spending. Subsidies must be scrutinised. Public money cannot be wasted. But there is…

There is a popular tendency to speak of history as though the South merely watched helplessly whenever invading armies swept across the Deccan. That narrative does a grave injustice to the people who fought, resisted, and reclaimed their homeland. The story of the Telugu people in the fourteenth century is one of the most striking…

It is the story of the Cat (Lomaśa) and the Mouse (Palita)…a masterclass on the anatomy of manufactured narrative, bad-faith warfare, and algorithmic weaponization of untruth. It reveals how a lie is not meant to convince you of a fact; it is engineered to fill the void of immediate attention before truth can mobilize. In…

M Radha Madhavi India’s banking sector today tells a striking before-and-after story. A decade ago, banks—particularly public sector banks—were weighed down by a mountain of stressed and hidden loans. Today, their balance sheets are considerably healthier, capital positions stronger and the level of bad loans has fallen to a historic low. The transformation did not…

For generations, we were taught that Bharat was merely a land repeatedly invaded and populated by successive waves of migrants. Modern genetic science is steadily challenging that simplistic narrative. Increasingly, archaeology, genetics and anthropology are revealing something far more profound—India was not merely a transit point in human history but one of the most important…

M Radha Madhavi Deep inside a remote tribal belt, far beyond the reach of highways, electricity and mobile signals, there once stood a tiny mud hut beside a dried riverbed. It was here that an old man chose to spend the last and perhaps the most meaningful years of his life. Nobody remembered his real…

M Radha Madhavi History is often written not merely by the victors, but also by those who control the narrative. Over time, certain societies are endlessly condemned for their past sins, while equally disturbing practices elsewhere are quietly forgotten, ignored or buried under layers of selective scholarship. Few examples illustrate this double standard better than…